Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

CDDB-like Database for ISBN? 21

Posted by Cliff from the if-it-works-for-CDs-why-not-books dept.
ElJefe asks: "I'm currently working on a project that will let students at my school buy and sell used textbooks from other students. For the site, I'd like to be able to enter an ISBN number, and have that bring up all relevant information (author, title, etc.). Basically, I'm looking for something analagous to CDDB or freedb, but for books instead of music. Does such a thing already exists? Are there copyright issues with creating such a database?" ISBN is an acronym for 'International Standard Book Number'.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

CDDB-like Database for Books? More

CDDB-like Database for Books?

Comments Filter:
  • I would hope its not illegal to create a database... whos work would you be copyrighting... its just the author and subject..

    As for where to get one.. try asking a local library or university library... They must get it from somewhere... ain't no way they entered all the books by hand...

  • This is a very interesting idea, but my concern is how the campus book stores will take it. They have a legal monopoly on cheap books for students, but are they protected by any laws? Is there anything that says nobody can sell books to students that cheap?

    There is also the issue of software liscences being bought/sold.

  • Use the dark side (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Deep link into Amazon!
  • Some students at my university recently completed a similar project. Their project was to work with the bookstore and professors to automate the book adoption process.

    They used a database called "Books In Print." I believe that the bookstore received this in paper form and they were able to buy a license for an electronic format (CD-ROM I think) but it was pretty expensive. I don't know if this is available online or not, but I'm pretty sure you can purchase CD's and load it into your own database. This would take a lot of space, so you might try searching for "Books In Print" to see if that turns up anything online for you to check into.

    Hope that helps a little.


    --
  • and this link [dialog.com] might help get you started. It looked confusing to me, but you might find something searchable in there somewhere.


    --
  • What campus book stores have you been to? All the ones I've been in you can get the same books online for ~the same price or quite a bit cheaper (especially engineering texts, it seems). I found a few of my books cheaper at three different online retailers than at the campus store, and they actually took Discover (gotta get that 1%), unlike my former CBS (Campus Book Store).

    As a student who routinely paid >$400 for books each semester, I don't remember any cheap ones.
  • Such systems do exist, but how they do it us a mystery. Check out the bookstore at McMaster [mcmaster.ca] in Canada. They can do it. Why can't we?
  • Two things - a student called Thai Tran at Stanford put together such an environment called www.booksmart.com. Seems to be dead now, you might find him using some directory services. Secondly, there is a vendor called MUZE, that can provide all the data you need (www.muze.com). I suspect they are expensive

  • Uh, you can search ISBNs in a bunch of places... (Score:3)

    by Vito ( 117562 ) on Thursday June 29, 2000 @08:51AM (#969302) Homepage

    Remember, kids: Google [google.com] is your friend. Try there before you Ask Slashdot.

    First, there's ISBN.nu [isbn.nu]. It's actually a really sweet portal/price comparison site, and it only searches ISBNs through the bookstores it's affiliated with (not all ISBNs in general), but it's a neat trick. :)

    Now, following the "About ISBN" link takes you to R. R. Bowker [bowker.com], which is the agency that assigns ISBN numbers in the US [bowker.com] (not in other countries! Other agencies do that!).

    Now, since they assign the ISBN numbers, they'd be in a great position to produce the Books in Print and Books Out-of-Print series of reference books, wouldn't they? And, lo and behold, they do!

    Bowker's Books in Print [booksinprint.com] website allows you to search all the ISBN numbers of books currently in print -- for a fee. That's right, it's not free, although there is a free trial [booksinprint.com] available. Annual subscription rates range from US$1850 for single site/single user/no reviews, to US$3375 for single site/multiple user/with reviews.

    Bowker also has their Books Out-of-Print [bowker.com] site online. It's also non-free, with single-user subscriptions [bowker.com] ranging from US$29 for one week of unlimited searching to US$699 for one year of unlimited searching.

    --Vito
  • The Library of Congress catalog [loc.gov] is searchable by ISBN, and it has a Z39.50 gateway. I'm not familiar with the details, but my understanding of Z39.50 is that it is a protocol for information retrieval often used for searching library catalogs (but not exclusively designed for that purpose), so that you can write your own client to search any library catalog with a Z39.50 gateway without having to go through their web interface, for example.

    LOC should have all books published in the US, and a goodly number of those published outside the US (although the collection is nowhere near complete, nor is it intended to be, for OUS books). One caveat is that LOC is somewhat slow to catalog new books, so books published within the last month or two may not be in there.

    A large number of other libraries [loc.gov] also have Z39.50 gateways to their catalogs, so you could even sytematically try other libraries' catalogs if you don't find it in LOC.

  • Most libraries use WorldCat [oclc.org], also known as the OCLC union catalog. Unfortunately, it's not available for free to the general public. However, you don't say what kind of school you're at--if you're at a college or university, there's a very good chance that they have WorldCat, and I believe most colleges/universities have licensed it for anyone in the college/university to use at no additional cost. Check with a librarian.
  • There is a publication called "Books in Print" -- published annually IIRC in both print (takes several shelves of a bookcase) and CD-ROM formats.

    It is intended to be a comprehensize reference of all books published, including ISBN. I'm unsure of the license fee...

    Looking at http://www.bowker.com/ [bowker.com] it seems there is also a "Books out of Print" too...

    These are likely to be pricey, but probably exactly what you need/want.
  • I'm going to copyright my children's names and the names of any books that they might potentially write so that they can't be used without my permission or I'll SUE DAMNIT!!! :) [Yeah yeah I know you can't copyright names - why don't you suck an egg anyway.] -Pete
  • I'm sure the campus book stores won't like it very much, but tough tittes to them!! I don't know what campus you are on, but I have never heard of any campus book store selling books for cheap...they will by them back for cheap, just to mark up the price to some insane amount, and sell them back to students.
    CBS are a central place to get all of your text books, but by no means do you have to go them. In fact, I would suggest avoiding them if at all possible, always look to buy your books off of someone who took the course before. It is way cheaper.
  • I was waiting for someone to say this. All you really need is the ISBN entries of the books you have, right ? So why have every book with an ISBN in there ?

    For a textbook situation, you likely to get a high repetition. So what you want to do is carefully set up the user interface so the first person gets to type in the whole description, but subsequent people can type in some part of the record (author, title, ISBN, call number) and it will complete the rest of it for them. You should have some way of checking and correcting the entries -- perhaps random checks of books you can physically access.

    What type of notice (if any) would you need on the submission form, if any, so that you could hold copyright and then GPL the database you collect ?

    If you write a nice tool, you have the potential to produce something that other small independent bookstores might use. It is always annoying to me to go to a small used bookstore and not be able to ask them to check their inventory by computer. If all the bookstores could easily inventory their stock and link them to one search engine that would tell you where to go, it would be much easier to find cheap copies of rare books.

    I'm going to drift off topic a bit here, but I'd like to suggest that if you produce a tool other bookstores can use, you design the system to encourage users to share their database back with a central repository in a CVS-like way. Then when there are conflicts indicating errors ( two books with the same ISBN, for example) these can be resolved by human intervention. Also, you build up a database free of licensing restraint which can compete with restricted commercial products. If you make it easy enough to use that little county libraries and small town bookstores across the world are constantly entering and correcting material, collaboratively producing a high quality product not controlled by a corporation, that would be awesome.

    To go even more offtopic, I have thought before of the possibility of huge distributed collabortive efforts to produce unfettered databases; the projects I thought made the most sense were dictionaries (there should be a GPL'd dictionary complete with work histories, pronounciation, etc, and everything else you expect in a good dictionary) and maps (I thought you might be able to produce some decent maps if you provided a tool that would allow someone to update a copy of it on a palm pilot with one of those GPS modules on it).

  • Hi, I'm the guy that posted the question in the first place.

    Since I posted it, I've done a bit of work. I found a web database that I can search by encoding the ISBN in the URL, and then parsing the resulting HTML page to get the author, price, etc. (all using PHP). If you're interested in seeing what I've got, let me know.

    -Chris
    (elion@its.caltech.edu)
  • The problem with the bookstore (in my mind) is not that their prices are too high, but that their buy-back offers are too low. Example: I was offered $3 for a math book that cost me betwen $30 and $50 new. This isn't really the bookstore's fault, since it's an independant company that does the buyback, but still...

    So the main motivation is to let people sell their books back at a higher price. I mean, I'm never going to need to know anything about chemical bonds again, but the book is still sitting on my bookshelf because I don't want to get $2 for it.

    -Chris
    (elion@its.caltech.edu)
  • This site: http://www.booksinprint.com [booksinprint.com] claims it will be live on July 5. It includes an "Add/Update in Books In Print" link which doesn't currently work.

    It would be nice if there was also a free IMDB service. It used to be that IMDB would let you access their database for free. Now they refuse any access -- but they were also bought by Amazon not too long ago.

    The Library of Congress apparently does not stock all books ever printed, ans one might think. I did a search for a Simpsons book (ISBN 0-06-019348-4) at their search page [loc.gov] and got back nothing. One less reason to go to D.C. I did not try their gateway service, which seems to include a lot of Universities, which is nice, but probably also not a catalog of all books ever printed.

    However, Google returned the right hit at the top when I sear ched for the ISBN number [google.com]. Of coursem the top link was to an Amazon affiliate. All the other links were to amazon affiliates as well. Hmmm....

    The site another poster mentioned, http://isbn.nu [isbn.nu], is also an Amazon Affiliate [isbn.nu] run by Glenn Fleishman [glenns.org], a seemingly know-it-all kind of guy. They are at least a comparison-shopping service.

    Ask Jeeves just returns a short list of places like Amazon and Borders when asked "where can I search for books by ISBN number [ask.com]." When asked, "What is an ISBN number," [askjeeves.com] -- which includes intresting information such as how place of origin is encoded into the number (a 0 or 1 as the first digit means 'english-speaking country', 4 is Japan, 9963 means Cyprus, etc). Here is an interesting bit (emphasis mine):
    Do I need an ISBN?

    If you want to make any sales to bookstores, you need to have an ISBN. If you want people to be able to find your book in the Books in Print directory, you need an ISBN. If you are publishing a book, odds are that not having one will do nothing but hurt your sales.
    Anyone know why that is?

    One thing I've not found is how ISBNs came to be, who governs them -- i.e., is it a government-regulated thing or it more like Dun & Bradstreet numbers? Might be an interesting answer in light of the quote above.
  • As others have already noted, the Library of Congress and other libraries offer a free Z39.50 service. If you'd like to build your own interface, try the Perl Z39.50 module [finsiel.it].
  • I worked for the auraria campus bookstore, in Denver, CO. Served three seperate schools, and we did NOT take discover :)

Slashdot Top Deals

"How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin

Close